Speech as the Perception of Affordances

Abstract

Historically, the field of phonetics has sought to validate competing theories of perception by searching for auditory or articulatory invariants. But speech communication differs from many forms of perception in that it is reciprocal: listeners are also speakers. This reciprocity is typically found in animal signaling systems, where the signal has evolved as a form of intentional interaction. We present a view of speech that takes account of this intentionality. Expanding upon direct realism's claim that affordances are perceived instead of symbols, we argue that the direct perception of speech requires the existence of “interaction affordances” arising from the dialogical process. In speech this moves us away from abstract objects of perception, for example, vocal tract gestures, and toward the objective half of a social affordance—the intentional speaker. We conclude by exploring the implications of this shift arguing that unification of the self and the environment in the perception of affordances provides an embodied account of speech that allows for optimization and variation within a loosely constrained auditory signal and continually changing articulatory gesture.